Breaking Windows

Windows rant ahead. Brace yourself.

I have no idea why, but my virtualized Windows XP just started bitching about

1
svchost

crashing and started acting all weird on me — and this was on an installation that’s only used (or turned on, even) when I needed to test my code on various versions of IE. At first I thought maybe VMWare got corrupted, so I did a fresh install of VMWare. Then I thought maybe I could revert Windows XP back to its previous known good state. None of these helped, of course. So I did what any sane Windows user would do — complete re-install of Windows XP from scratch! Hah hah! I feel sorry for the poor souls who have to deal with this kind of crap all the time.

Thank god VMWare makes Windows installation easy and fast (at least 1/2 the time it takes for a fresh install on a real PC!). The first thing I do is to get rid of all the fluff out of Windows — games, MSN Explorer, Accessibility programs, Windows tour, Outlook Express (officially dead program by Microsoft’s definition)… etc. Then I started installing various versions of IE (5.01, 5.5, 6.x & 7) and other perceived “goodies” including MSN Live Messenger. Then Windows XP complained again in its own cute little way — it’s looking for

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msoert2.dll

… WTF!?! It’s a fresh install! It couldn’t possibly have something missing that MSN Live Messenger needed!

Then Google said it was a library that was removed when I got rid of Outlook Express. So why is it that MSN Live Messenger 8.5.xxx, the latest and greatest from Redmond, needs to depend on a library from a program that’s supposedly extinct? Locating and putting back the

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msoert2.dll

file back to

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Windows/system32

directory made it happy again though. And that’s all I cared.

I am guessing it’s a hook for MSN contacts to appear in Outlook Express and Outlook so that people who spend way too much time in those programs can start up chat sessions without having to look for the MSN Live Messenger contact list.

All this crap brought back the good old days of Windows tech support and having to decipher cryptic Windows errors. “Good” times.